Red Light Run

by Baird Harper

  “. . . Why my father then chose to come back to Wicklow,” Glennis continued, “I’ll never know, except that he loved this town, and I think he wanted to outlive the notoriety. I wish he had.” She turned and put the urn loudly onto the mantel, pausing to work a knot from her throat. “Anyway, that’s all I feel compelled to say today. If you want to hear a different story about my dad you should talk to his best friend . . .” She put her hand to her brow, locating Rick where she’d left him minutes earlier. “Rick LaForge, who works every day to make Wicklow notable rather than notorious.” She seemed on the verge of laughing, but then her face turned grim. The crowd had gone silent. An arm reached out, begging her off the pedestal. Glennis swiped it away.

  “And if you want Rick to tell a happy story about my dad then you might start the conversation by telling him ‘thanks.’ Or better yet, tell him that you’re sorry for thinking he could ever have done something so terrible.”

  At this, she finally stepped down, floating through the crowd and up the stairs. No one followed. If she had any friends, none of them were there. It occurred to Rick, then, that perhaps he was her only real friend, and that with Emmit gone she may have been his. He wondered if it was up to him to follow her upstairs, but he didn’t do it. There was a husband, after all, whose parents were in attendance. So he stayed downstairs, doing just what she’d suggested. He told the story about his last-second throw in the state quarterfinals and Emmit’s miraculous catch in the back of the end zone. And a dozen other anecdotes about his friend, and about Janice too, stories of when the quarry was still getting deeper and the mill still smoked, stories whose backdrops were the happier, healthier settings of Wicklow before the rust.

  RELEASE PARTY

  Usually, Billy Nolan dreams of clouds—lacy strands of cirrus, big puffy cumulus. His unconscious self likes to go fishing or camping, and always, featured prominently in these dreamscapes, are clouds. A palm reader he dated some years ago said this meant he had a buoyant, youthful soul. Though later on, as she threw his clothing out the window of her apartment, she’d called him an overgrown child.

  But on this morning, he wakes from a dream of undead teenagers being hunted by a maniac in a pickup truck. The details are fading now, but the sense of menace is difficult to shake off.

  As he sits up in the backseat of his Dodge and rubs sleep from his eyes, he remembers that his son is being released from prison today, so the nightmare may only be a manifestation of this day’s pressures. Except that Billy Nolan doesn’t feel stress. That people worry over things not immediately in front of them mystifies him. His ex-wife, before she found him “emotionally detached,” had seemed to admire his unflappability. But as the marriage soured, Kate came to view it as the primary symptom of what she called his “enduring adolescence.”

  In the wake of the palm reader breakup, it occurred to him that, for all their efforts, the women in his life were failing to fix him. So he decided to do it himself. He quit smoking and drinking, and gave the money he’d have spent each week on those things to an investment guru who held meetings in a karate studio in Ukrainian Village. Sensei Gary preached the power of chanting to force a better reality. There’s a rich man inside you, everyone recited at the start of meetings, just let him out. The flood is coming, be inflatable. Gary wore long hair and a well-groomed beard. His palms bore scars from catching throwing stars, which he’d rub while recounting karate stories with biblical self-help morals attached. Look beyond your clenched fists, and you’ll begin to see the signs from God.

  Billy doesn’t believe in God any more than he believes in stress, but he did like going to a place with swords on the walls, and the time spent with Sensei Gary had been reaping real benefits. He’d begun working out again and joined a softball league. He was holding down a job and even started sending postcards to his son again. But then the FBI crashed the dojo and led kimono Jesus out in handcuffs. When it all got sorted out months later, the money everyone had been tithing in got redistributed, and Billy concluded that having all that liquor and tobacco cash come rushing back to him was its own sign from God.

  As Billy rubs his forehead, the hangover pulses beneath his fingers. He tries to think, but there are no chants to negate a night of heavy drinking. When his eyes finally refocus, the day outside his car is bright, the sun already high. A flyer pinned beneath his windshield wiper flutters in the breeze, and beyond it, the bar at which he spent the previous evening sits up against the sidewalk, its neon light turned off, a big silver padlock on the door. Across the street, the open pastures of a cemetery roll away toward a distant wood of low-hanging willows. Among the headstones are dozens of tree stumps lopped at waist height, and a smattering of newly planted trees with nylon bags slung around their bases.

  Billy slides across the backseat and gets out to retrieve the paper tucked beneath his wiper blade. Dear Asshole, it reads. I took your keys. If you want them back the bar opens again at 4 p.m.—Armstrong

  When he lowers the paper, he notices half a face looking out at him from the front passenger seat of his car, the top of a head and eyes. The rest of what appears to be a teenage girl cowers in the well beneath the dashboard. He walks around the car and opens the passenger door.

  “What are you supposed to be?” he asks.

  The teenager presses herself sheepishly up onto the seat. She wears dark cargo pants and a black tank top. Her bare shoulders and arms swirl with tattoos of spiderwebs and cat’s-eyes. Her black hair and combat boots shine, but the rest of her is grungy and tattered.

  “Did I dream of you?” he asks. “Are you from my dreams?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Ew, sick, don’t get all pervy.”

  “Hold on, I’m still waking up here. I was asleep in the back—” He yanks the door open wider. “This is my car, you know.”

  She looks cautiously up the street, one way then the other. She’s nearly pretty, but in a way he finds unfortunate, as if she’s been crying all week, or has chosen a style of eye shadow that means to give that impression.

  “You let me in,” she says. “That freak was chasing us.”

  “What freak?”

  “The guy in the green truck.”

  “I thought I dreamed that too.”

  “Yeah, you were pretty out of it when I knocked on the window. Then you went right back to sleep. You’re a really loud snorer.” The girl takes the note from his hand, reads it. “Well that sucks.”

  At the end of the block, the green pickup appears. The one from his dream or the one from the girl’s account. Both. The truck idles a moment longer at the empty intersection, then turns and rumbles closer, the driver’s head swinging from the cemetery on one side of the road to the empty storefronts on the other. The girl crawls back under the dash. The truck crunches through the gravel. Billy turns, staring directly at the approaching vehicle. The pickup stops abruptly, waits, then U-turns and disappears again down the empty block.

  “Thanks,” the girl says, climbing out again. “He’s been circling the block forever. I wasn’t even doing anything wrong. Isn’t a cemetery like public property?”

  “I don’t think so,” he says. “You got a vehicle around here?”

  The girl motions to a small blue car parked several hundred yards down the street. “Do you think it’s safe to make a run for it yet?”

  “Tell you what . . .” Billy says, crumpling the note and dropping it on the ground. “Since I’ve apparently done you a great favor here, how about we make a run for it together, and then you give me a ride to someplace I can get some pancakes.”

  //

  As they ride in her car through a tired-looking neighborhood, Billy thinks of Hartley’s father-in-law, who once owned a home somewhere nearby. He recalls standing on its front lawn with his son a decade earlier, both of them in tuxedos waiting for a car to take them to the church.

  He’d meant to visit his son in prison, but the eight-year sentence offered such a broad window. When Kate called last month to remind
him of Hartley’s early release, she described her disappointment at Billy not having made the trip to Grassland. But Billy refused her scorn, noting instead his surprise at the time having passed so suddenly.

  “Parole?” he’d exclaimed. “Already?” Though by the end of their conversation his ex-wife made it clear that the time had probably not passed as easily for Hartley.

  “I’m not a robot, Kate,” he’d barked into the phone. “I get that this is important.”

  “You keep saying ‘it’s important,’ ” she said. “But you haven’t said you’ll be there when he gets out.” This was Kate, always trying to cut through the trifling nature of conversation to get a person to make promises. “Billy,” she said forcefully, “Hartley expects you to be there.”

  And so, as the satanic-looking girl drives him through Wicklow, he remarks at one house and another, wondering aloud whether it’s the one he remembers standing in front of, “. . . which my son’s father-in-law owned, and which my daughter-in-law then inherited, and now, shit, I think the bank seized it or something. I don’t know. It’s been hard times for them since Hartley went in.”

  “Went in where?” the girl asks. With each bump in the road the inky creatures on her arms shudder to life, and a measure of real fear stabs into his chest. He understands that undead teenagers aren’t real, but he can’t shake the sense that his dream has returned to muddle the reality of waking day.

  When all the cigarette and booze money came back to him after the feds took down Sensei Gary, he’d gotten into more expensive habits, into pills especially, painkillers and ecstasy and some rarer pharmaceuticals trafficked in from Eastern European countries he’d never even heard of. He couldn’t now reconcile this decision, but at the time an escalation had felt necessary. At his worst, he’d ended up in a pop-up camper in the North Woods of Wisconsin with someone’s cleaning lady and a grocery bag loose with Slavic drugs. It was a mint-green pill he’d found tucked in the bag’s paper seam that took him for a ride from which he still hadn’t fully returned. The hallucinations dissipated in a day and a half, and the flashbacks quit after a week, but he continues experiencing episodes at least once a day when he abruptly loses confidence in the reality of what he’s seeing. And as he stares at the dead-looking girl, one of these spells takes hold of him.

  This is real, he chants in his head, but she is not a zombie. The zombies were just a dream. This is real, and yet you do not need to be concerned.

  “So,” the girl says, “where did your son go into?”

  “Prison.”

  Her foot releases the accelerator. “I could tell something was bothering you.”

  “I’m pretty hungover.”

  She turns a corner around a used-car lot. A sign with a woodpecker on it announces WOODY’S HOT RODS, but the cars behind the fence all look broken down. A minute later she’s pulling over in front of a diner.

  “This place used to be an abortion clinic,” she says. “So I wouldn’t eat the eggs.” She blinks, waiting. “Before that it was a diner. Again. But before.” When he still doesn’t get out of the car, she says, “Prison? Really?”

  “But Hartley’s actually a good kid.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He was a trader,” Billy says. “In Chicago.”

  “I mean to get himself in prison. Did he kill someone or something?”

  “He didn’t mean to.”

  The girl nods. “Sure, just like the Soyfield Strangler.”

  He checks the time on his phone. “Who the hell’s the Soyfield Strangler?”

  “He was our local serial killer,” she says, with pride. “Before they executed him, he gave an interview where he swore it wasn’t his fault. He said he murdered all those people while he was sleepwalking.” She pauses, wide-eyed, letting this information sink in.

  Billy tries to be interested, but he can’t look away from her tattoos. There’s a quickening in his veins. A bitterness pools beneath his tongue. The mint-green pill is stalking him.

  “And at the end of this interview,” she continues, “they asked him what it was he’d been dreaming about while he was killing all those people, and do you know what he said?”

  “Zombies?”

  The girl bursts into laughter, then she laughs some more, taking quite a while to collect herself. “Not zombies, no,” she finally says.

  “What was it then?” Billy asks. “Oh shit, was it clouds?”

  She laughs even harder, putting a finger up to beg his patience. Billy would mind this more were it not breaking up her air of undead menace, and the longer she goes on the more his heart settles into its usual rhythm.

  “So . . .” he says. “What was it?”

  The girl takes a deep restorative breath. “Never mind.”

  The windows of the abortion clinic bustle with hungry citizens, but Billy’s own appetite has abandoned him, and it’s getting close to time anyway. “It turns out I don’t have time for pancakes,” he announces, squinting past the diner at the dark ribbon of storm clouds on the horizon. “What I really need is a ride to the prison.” He turns to the girl, staring into the caverns of her eyes. “I’ll buy you some beer of course,” he adds. “For your time, and trouble. But really, you’d be doing a tremendous thing for Hartley.”

  //

  The year before, an investigator for the Illinois Department of Corrections came to Billy’s apartment to ask whether he’d been planning to break his son out of jail. An unsigned letter had apparently been sent to the prison, addressed to Hartley, outlining just such a scheme. By the time the investigator had tracked Billy down they were ready to call it a hoax, though some trouble it caused anyway had earned Hartley a one-day extension of his sentence.

  Thinking of it now, as the girl pulls into the quickie mart parking lot, Billy entertains the fantasy that maybe he had penned that letter, perhaps during his pharmaceutical bender. Maybe there’s still time, he thinks. Still almost twenty minutes left to do what he should have done years ago, break his boy out.

  When the girl has finally picked something out, the man at the register shakes his head. “Can’t sell liquor for another fifteen minutes,” he explains. “Blue laws.”

  “In another fifteen minutes,” Billy says, “I have to be at Grassland. My son’s getting out after four years and all he wants in the world is this beer.” He sets his hand on the box the girl has chosen, a twelve-pack of wine coolers with tanned beachgoers lazing all over the packaging.

  The clerk glances up at the security camera trained on his position. “Come back at five till and I’ll see what I can do.”

  Outside the quickie mart, Billy and the girl stand looking at a billboard advertising a paintball arena called Derelict Mill DeadZone beside an older billboard for something called Trailer Park Meltdown.

  “So paintball’s pretty big around here?”

  The girl shrugs. “This one guy is just buying up all the abandoned stuff around town and calling it postapocalyptic.” She checks her phone and sighs. She says, “Look, I’m not going to be able to wait around at the prison. This is a one-way trip, okay?”

  “You never told me,” says Billy. “What does the Soyfield Strangler dream of?”

  But then the door bucks open and the clerk waves them in. The ensuing transaction takes on the air of a drug deal. When it’s finally over, Billy’s phone reads two minutes before the hour.

  //

  There’s an accident on the state highway. A jackknifed dairy tanker. A detour through cornfields. When they finally get to the prison there aren’t any cars in the lot and Billy knows he’s screwed before the guard opens his mouth.

  “Already been released,” the guard explains. “Gone home.”

  Billy dials Kate, but it goes to voice mail after one ring. “She’s ignoring me, can you believe that?”

  The girl’s face appears to believe it just fine.

  “All right,” Billy says. “Just take me back to my car.” He calls Kate again, straight to voice mail. “
Kate, it’s Billy, I don’t know what happened. Okay, I fucked up, but there was this complete asswipe who stole my keys and I had to hitch my way to the prison, and now, I don’t know, looks like they let Hartley out early? Anyway, call me. Are we doing a dinner or something? Tell Hartley congrats and I’ll meet you guys wherever.”

  When he gets out beside his own car the girl speeds off down the sleepy gravel street. The dust cloud in her wake drifts over the cemetery. Above it, the band of darkness on the horizon has grown wider, dimly greenish, while the sun directly overhead drills down upon him.

  It’s even hotter in the car, and he can’t roll the windows down. He checks his phone again, then goes to the door of the bar and kicks the padlock until dents appear in the wood behind the lock. Then he finds a hunk of cement and stands looking at himself in the bar’s single window, trying to come to terms with the fact that breaking the glass will mean destroying the neon Chicago Bears sign behind it. Then his cell phone buzzes.

  “Kate, I’ve been calling and calling—”

  “Billy, listen to me.”

  “This complete cocksucker took my—”

  “Billy.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We’re being followed,” Kate says. “By a crazy person. A man in a car has been following us since the prison and I think he wants to hurt Hartley. We’ve been driving in circles for half an hour and Hartley won’t let me call the police.”